Scholarly Concepts
One of the goals of this website is to make scholarly articles more accessible to activists on the ground. Reading hardcore science can be intimidating and overwhelming, especially when there are lots of words or concepts that aren’t familiar. These posts aim to clearly explain some key scholarly concepts that show up in the articles we use to back up our advice. That way, if you are interested in reading these papers, or other papers in the future, you will have the skills to dissect the science in order to pull out the helpful information.
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Measured Effects of Real Protest Movements
Did the George Floyd protests change the opinions of Americans? The article The Opinion-Mobilizing Effect of Social Protest Against Police Violence: Evidence from the 2020 George Floyd Protests, by Tyler Reny and Benjamin Newman. The researchers found that the George Floyd protests had a major impact on the U.S. public, but primarily gained support for…
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Effective Altruism and Activism
Effective Altruism: What it is Effective altruism is a method of research based charitable giving. It uses measurable data to find the most effective way to donate through determining which causes will be the most beneficial to the highest number of people, and how neglected the cause is to begin with. This concept can be…
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Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT)
What are RCT’s? RCT’s are a type of experimental design where participants are randomly assigned to a treatment and control group. The treatment group receives the intervention (treatment) while the control group does not. These two groups are then compared to see the impact of the intervention on the outcome of interest. The goal of…
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Instrumental Variable
What is an Instrumental Variable? An instrumental variable is an outside variable that is correlated with and predicts the treatment variable (independent) but not with the dependent variable except through its correlation to the independent variable. When is it Useful? Instrumental variables are used to identify the causal link between the independent and dependent variables…
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The Endogeneity Problem
Correlation vs. Causation When doing research, it is important to establish causation, not just correlation. It is easy to show that one thing correlates with another, but that does necessarily mean that it causes something. For example, the graph below shows a strong correlation between “people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool” and…
